Though he thought I was asleep in the sun, I was not. I was lucid.
For a long time I watched his ship departing
until the flag at the stern vanished, eaten by the gray horizon.
Then the gulls came, then the stars. I began to live between visions
of reunion and the truth shifting like tides against the dunes.
Under a tent of yaupons I built a hut of driftwood, using sea oats
for a threshold and the emptied halves of mollusk shells for the roof.
Butterflies traversed the shore. When I held the ocean's shell
to my ear we were one
vessel speaking to another vessel
about the rapture of the void.